I
worked that job for ten months. Roof sheeting can be insane, and it’s only a
needle in the stack of insane jobs. There was absolutely no mercy from the sun
in the blazing summers of California’s foothills. We brought gallon milk jugs
filled with frozen water but it would all be gone long before the end of the
day, as hot as a spa by that time. We slipped on our own sweat, skittered down
the sheets before regaining balance, and searched for spots where it was dry. In
the winter, when the rains fell, sometimes for days, the bars and the armchairs
were the only places to go for most people. I loved those days though, and lost
myself in reading. But in between pages worry about the rent and bills
sometimes settled down upon me like a gentle snow, and a chill passed through
me. When it wasn’t raining we got to the job site at seven AM and the roofs
glistened with the ice crystals that coated the surface of the plywood. We’d
wait around for the rising sun to work a bit of magic in melting the ice but
Growly nearly always got impatient and shouted; “Get to work! What are ya
standing around for?”
One
day a guy went down. He was on a house about four over from ours, on a cul-de-sac,
and as the sun edged over the Ponderosa pines to the east it illuminated his
roof like a stage. A sudden glint of sunlight off his hammer pierced my eye,
and when I looked back he was down on his ass, sliding down the roof with bits
of ice and sprays of the previous night’s rain forming a halo about him. He
sailed off the edge of the roof like a toboggan. The newly installed and
innovative plastic gutter tore off and both objects were airborne for the
briefest of moments. The gutter fell onto the freshly poured concrete driveway,
clattering like castanets, while the carpenter landed on a mountain of chunky
pieces of clay peppered with 2 x 4 and 2 x 6 cut-offs. He was lucky. The
ambulance came and took him away, they fixed his broken leg, and he only lost
three months of work, and there was no doubt about his claim for worker’s comp.
A
couple days later I went over to Pietro’s house. I hadn’t been there before. It
was a squat little place that sat sandwiched between a couple of other squat
little places, just a block or two from downtown Grass Valley. There was a cute
little scallop to the fascia boards that led steeply to the ridge of the roof and
a worn redwood deck led to the front door. I tripped over a plastic scooter as
I reached for the bell.
“Hey
man!” Pietro exclaimed as he opened the
door. “Come on in, man!” He looked around at a cacophony of toys and thin but
tall kid’s books and strewn clothes littering the floor and couch and said,
“Let’s go in the kitchen, man.”
We
sat at the kitchen table.
“Man,
we make a good team.” he said.
“I
think you’re right. Why, do you think? We’re so different.”
“Doesn’t
matter, man. We’re the same where it counts. We both got soul.”
I
laughed.
“We
do, eh?”
“Yeah,
mon, we got soul! We can take the pain and turn it into gain!”
“You’re
shucking and jiving now, my friend.”
“Look,
let’s do this.” He reached into the penny pocket of his jeans and came out with
a bindle of coke. He pulled a small mirror over and spilled some of the powder
onto it. A razor blade appeared from nowhere and he chopped and diced and
sorted the lines, rolled a dollar into a tube, and handed it to me.
It
went up my nose with a medicinal burn and I quickly came alive.
“Yeah!”
Maria,
Pietro’s wife, appeared in the doorway, as if she was a sentinel. Pietro
grabbed a newspaper and covered the evidence, smoothly, as if he was doing
nothing other than stretching.
Maria
merely looked at both of us, coldly, as if we were clams. She was rather wide
now but I could see that once she must have been foxy, a Latino lover that
surely drove Pietro into the situation he now found himself in – endlessly
torturing his body to sustain the outcome of that attraction.
“I
love my wife. I really do.” He bent down and sucked up a line like a vacuum
cleaner. “She used to be so beautiful!” He bent down again. “I need you, man! I
need you! I am so deep in debt! We’re making money! Let’s kick ass, buddy!”
He
pushed the mirror to me and as I bent to send the line to my nose I regretted
everything, everything, from the day of my birth to the day I would die, it was
all a bunch of crap, and I had no power over it. Pietro, Joe, Mitch, Jimmy,
Helio, Growly, Billy, Fuckhead, and all the bloody and battered workers I’d
shared both rotten and beautiful moments with, their names were like a list on
the wall of a monument, were doomed to a life where their potential was
squandered and finally squashed. Beauty bathed each and every one of us every
day but we never seemed able to grasp a hold of it. Life was a monumental struggle,
and in a world of such bounty no one could understand why.
After I’d said goodbye I looked up at Pietro’s
house and wondered about the lives that happened in there.
Then
I turned and headed back to my place. Joice was waiting, impatiently, and nothing was going to stop our outcome
from happening.
